May round-up

At the start of the month, I wrote in my research journal: “May must be very, very productive”. By productive I meant researching and writing a lot. And I really meant it. But…

… my good intentions went down hill very, very, very quickly.

As I look at the square in my diary that shows me that May is ending, I can not help thinking “Where did the month go?”.

These were the highlights of the month for me. Let me know yours.

Researching

I have been mostly reading about, and refreshing my knowledge of, co-creation. I put together a visual summary of the literature here.

Writing

Here, too, I have been mostly focused on the topic of co-creation, as I am drafting a paper using co-creation as the guiding framework. It has been a very slow, almost painful, process, however.

In addition to that, I reviewed and resubmitted a paper about social media crises, and I started working on the website materials for the Research Methods books.

Teaching

At the beginning of the month, I wrapped up teaching Digital Marketing Strategies to our MSc Marketing students. Later in the month, I started facilitating Company Projects – this is a module where the MSc Marketing students work on live marketing consultancy projects. This summer we have projects with an art gallery, a hotel and a software developer.

Learning

I went to a conference on CAQDAS and learned a lot about the latest developments in technological tools to analyse qualitative data, including visual data (pictures and videos). I picked up a couple of demos and I am looking forward to checking how good they are to analyse Twitter conversations.

In addition, I finally read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I found the idea of the book extremely powerful. Dweck argues that, when approaching a problem, we can adopt one of two mindsets: the fixed mindset (where we assume that our talents are fixed and success is determined by having, or not, particular skills) and the growth mindset (where we assume that talents can be developed and, hence, success is enabled by hard work and perseverance). I could clearly see how, sometimes, I got get trapped in a fixed mindset.

I really enjoyed the numerous examples provided in the book, showing the application of the concepts to various areas of life, from personal relationships to teaching / learning, and including the author’s own life. Having said that, I did find the book a bit frustrating because it is very repetitive. I think the book could either be cut down by one-third or so; or, alternatively, the author could go beyond the anecdotes and add detail and deeper insight into how the mindsets are developed and, in particular, changed.

On a very different note, thanks to Arjan Tupan’s European Portraits series, I have also been learning about what various European citizens think about the EU. And I was very honoured to be featured in this series, too (here).